What’s the ROI of Influencer Marketing? [The Starbucks Case Study]

For nearly 20 years Starbucks releases a special edition of their cups around the holidays season. The company sets aside the labeled white cups and serves its drinks in festive red cups.

This holiday season Starbucks decided to make something special: they released a limited edition of the red cups decorated with 13 paintings made by customers from all around the world.

The painted cups are part of Starbucks’ #RedCupArt campaign, in which the company invites its customers to visit the stores, grab a plain red holiday cup and paint their own masterpiece on it. When shared through Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #RedCupArt, the artwork can be featured on Starbucks’ popular social channels.

Starbucks Smart Influencer Choices

To help jumpstart the social campaign, Starbucks outreached to creative illustrators and invited them to express their ideas over a holiday cup. Here are some of the influencers Starbucks connected with:

Heather Rooney, self-though Illustrator and a popular YouTuber with more than a million subscribers. From her demographics data we can see that 64% of her audience are highly involved in drawing, art and design.

Sam Larson, a fascinating artist from Portland. When looking at his all-time top content, it’s easy to notice his love for coffee cups painting goes way back. More than one third of his audience are artists themselves.

Kelly Klapstein, a Lettering artist. Kelly posts on her popular Instagram channel lettering videos that are being watched by tens of thousands of people.

Pinot Ichwandardi, a well known animator. Pinot knows the marketing industry from the inside out, from his work at the digital agency Vayner Media. The vast majority of his audience is into animation, sketching, and drawing.

Jesi, an artist with colorful poppy style from Ohio. Take a look at her profile to get the full experience of her happy beautiful art.

And the list goes on and on. As you can see, Starbucks made well-informed choices with their influencer selection. They reached out to influencers with relevant expertise and especially those with highly engaged communities in the space of graphic design, drawing, and illustration. After making these choices, let’s see what the artists have created, and what was in it for Starbucks.

Measuring The Influencers Social Success

Gathering all the data about an influencer marketing campaign and measuring its success can be cumbersome. To overcome this burden, we recently launched a new smart feature that helps marketers get a full campaign report with just one click of a button.

The new reporting feature sends the marketer a fully designed PDF report with the influencers performance breakdown. The #RedCupArt influencer campaign was a great opportunity to test it out.

The first step to see the campaign results was to monitor mentions of the #RedCupArt hashtag. From that monitor, it was easy to curated a sample list of 15 influencers from the States and Canada, who shared updates with the #RedCupArt hashtag.

And then there was only one thing left to do – click the PDF Report button. Here’s what we got (feel free to click the influencers’ profiles and posts):

Optimize Campaigns With Influencer Marketing Reports

As you can see from the report above, the selected influencers reached almost half a million people, and nearly 100,000 engagements with their paintings.

But we shouldn’t stop here. One of the biggest insights to gain from the report is learning more about the impact each of the influencers made. You can dive into the report, see how many times the influencer used the hashtag, how many engagements they got, and how many people the actually reached with the True Reach metric.

The data makes it easier to take smarter decisions in any future campaigns. With a better understanding of past performance, one can fine tune the optimal number of influencers to work with, the number of posts they should share, the influencers selection, and much more.

For Starbucks, just one Instagram post from each influencer was effective enough to start the ripple and get the conversation around the campaign going.

Know Your ROI

Today, every company that works with influencers needs an easy solution to summarize their efforts and measure the campaign ROI. In the marketer’s hyperactive life, the 1-click report is a powerful tool that summarizes the influencers performance in an effortless way.

Have any questions about measuring influencer marketing success? Please tell us. We would love to share from our experience.